THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION

Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do: Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More By Judith Rich Harris Free Press; 462 pages; $26 Despite the measured subtitle, textbook writer Judith Rich Harris' pursuit in "The Nurture Assumption" is proving that kids raise one another. Parents, in her view, exert no "important long-term effects on the development of their child's personality."

Because her notion defies common sense, the experience of most parents and mounds of scientific substantiation, Harris has embarked on a formidable undertaking. Her twin burden is to advance a coherent case for the supremacy of peer influence while invalidating the existing data favoring the power of nurture. Her book shows her capable of neither mission.

Harris' rhetorical weaknesses cripple her own hypothesis before it gets off the ground. She consistently eschews evidential support or tight reasoning in favor of recycled anecdotes and unsubstantiated assertions. Her penchant for oversimplifying often nullifies her point, as when she generalizes about what kids need.

"If spending so much time with their parents is so all-fired important to children, why is it so hard to get them to come home?" she asks, leaving the reader to wonder just what "children" she is talking about. Infants? Toddlers? Teenagers? Harris regularly proceeds as if her imprecision were a license to equate apples and oranges -- here, the demands of adolescents and those of much younger children.

Just as damaging to her brief is Harris' surreal inclination to treat fairy tales as proof. "The Nurture Assumption" combs the Cinderella fable for an underlying parents- don't-matter message. (The verdict: Cinderella had a bad stepmother but still made it to the ball. Peers get the credit by default.)

Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" books are said to "provide vivid evidence of . . . how different styles of parenting can produce equally satisfactory results." Vivid, yes; evidence, no.

Harris tells us that Harvard's graduate program in psychology ejected her before she could finish her doctorate. She credits the rebuff with freeing her from the ideological straitjacket of mainstream psychology. That liberation from orthodoxy apparently entails reading fairy tales as truth.

Further disintegration ensues when Harris confronts -- or sidesteps -- the nurture data. She acknowledges that a "mountain of evidence" confirms that parental care shapes children in enduring ways. Her answer is to omit mention of most of this work. The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who founded the scientific study of nurture and wrote a dozen books on the subject, receives one paragraph in "The Nurture Assumption."

Bowlby was lucky to be named at all; Harris does not clearly identify most of the studies that she ventures to discuss. And if a study somewhere reported data unfriendly to her view, she says, the results probably emanated from statistical hanky- panky.

Harris' own readiness to misreport does nothing to commend her as an arbiter of academic probity. Suppose, for instance, that somebody raised a group of children together without parents. Would the children turn out to be normal or deranged? Such an experiment would go a long way toward defining the relative influence of peers and parents. That test has been done many times -- not on humans, but on other primates. Harris tells us that these studies show peer- raised rhesus monkeys to be "reasonably normal."

False. The research demonstrates that peer-raised monkeys are timid, clingy and vulnerable to stress and exhibit abnormal function in the serotonin and norepinephrine systems in the brain. (In humans, these neurotransmitters are critical for the control of mood stability as well as anxiety and depression.) Peers make great playmates, but young monkeys need a parental presence to develop normally. So do our children.

Those who prefer their facts served straight will find "The Nurture Assumption" hard to swallow. Even parents pained by their children's imperfections will be skeptical of Harris' get- out-of-guilt-free card: her argument that since parents do nothing, they can do no wrong.

"Child-rearing is easier when it's done without guilt and without having to think about what long-term effects your actions might have on your child's fragile little psyche," she opines breezily. Then she grants blanket immunity for parental misconduct ranging from neglect to beatings.

Harris proves more eager to confer absolution than a priest on a battlefield. She isn't even sure that abuse is bad for children. Although she admits that beating children occasionally causes brain damage, post-traumatic stress or multiple personality disorder, Harris believes that "for abuse not severe enough to produce (these three disorders), it is not clear to me that there are any psychological effects that children take with them when they leave home."

Readers who tire of such inanities will be relieved to learn that Harris derives her conclusions not from science or logic but from her own childhood. Harris has little to say about her parents. But no less than seven times in the course of her book, she describes how, as a child, upscale peers rejected her.

"The other girls were sophisticated little ladies, interested in hairstyles, proud of their pretty clothes. I wasn't like them, and they didn't like me," she frets. "The kids in the snooty suburb had accomplished what my parents could not: they had changed my personality."

This oft-repeated tale forms the book's leitmotif. Harris is apparently unaware that by broaching the specter of her unhappy past, she highlights the personal agenda beneath her professed impartiality. Many readers will conclude that her book does not recount a scientific breakthrough but a lengthy, long-delayed complaint about the snobbish girls who made her suffer.

When a psychological theory claims universal and exclusive importance for the one element of the author's childhood that bothered her most, watch out. In this instance, Harris' "revolutionary" discovery proves flimsier than Kate Moss on Slimfast.

But in a sound-bite culture, the message that survives is often the simplest, not the truest. The media, from the New Yorker to Barbara Walters to Newsweek, are now trumpeting Harris' slender speculation.

Those entrusted with the momentous responsibility of shepherding our next generation to adulthood should tune out the hype and love their children. Parents matter more than Harris thinks, and her book matters less.